Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church

Chapter 12

SLOW TORTURE

About the third or fourth or fifth time that we swung out into the
glare—it was along there somewhere, a couple of hours or so after
sun-up—it wasn’t as pleasant as it had been.

When I woke up, my head was clear as a child’s and there wasn’t a soul
stirring. It looked to be about 6 o’clock of a fine, bright morning. I
sat up on the edge of the bed, in the same place I had occupied during
the Psychedelian PTA meeting the night before, which was also the site
of the candle mystery of my previous visit. I looked around for traces
of wax and spotted an aperitif glass at my feet with what looked like
brandy in it. Well, I thought, the cute rich girl from New York, fully
conversant with every known form of human degeneracy, had probably
left it there to steady my nerves in the morning. Very considerate of
her. Good thing I hadn’t kicked it over, although I didn’t really need
it badly because I hadn’t put away more than half my usual intake the
day before.

Heavy drinkers will sometimes become moderate drinkers if there is
plenty of cannabis around. One just forgets about booze, or getting up
and finding the next one seems like too much trouble.

Hmmm, perhaps it was bad form for me to have passed out on Tim’s
bed. It might be considered “a sacred shrine area” or something. This
idea caused some minor anxiety so I tossed down the brandy and went to
the bathroom to brush my teeth. It wasn’t so easy. I felt slightly
dizzy. Things looked a little strange. I headed back towards the
bed. The first rays of the sun were coming through the big window on
my left, and I turned to get a full view of it.

I was knocked to the floor, as all normal sensation and motor control
left my body. The sun, roaring like an avalanche, was headed straight
for me, expanding like a bomb and filling my consciousness in less
time than it takes to describe it. It swirled, clockwise, and made
two-and-one-half turns before I lost all normal sense of place and
passed out, right there on the floor of Tim’s room. The next day,
Susan Metzner told me she had heard a thump, perhaps the sound of my
body hitting the floor, and had crossed the hall and looked in to see
me prostrate and apparently unconscious.

“I wasn’t stoned in any way,” Susan emphasized. No reason why she
should have been, at 6 in the morning. “You turned every color of the
rainbow and then you disappeared right in front of my eyes!”

I don’t remember that. The next thing I do remember is rolling around
on the floor in Dick’s room, which was across the hall from Tim’s,
adjoining Ralph and Susan’s.

Although I didn’t see myself disappear, there is nothing in my
philosophy which would make such an occurrence impossible. You can’t
see sight, as Buddha often remarked. And Susan was the last person in
the house whom I had any reason to think would encourage me to believe
anything magical or extraordinary had happened. So I believe her
report, but only, I am convinced, because I have a conceptual context
in which to place it. I think there are many people who have forgotten
equally bizarre occurrences within a matter of hours. The memory of
events that don’t “make sense” just fades away.

On the floor of Dick’s room I had what I later found out was called in
the East the Kundalini (“serpent power”) experience, a kind of mirror
image of the vision of the exploding sun. I seemed to be inside a
whirlwind of electrical plasma which also made two-and-one-half
gigantic turns, this time counter-clockwise. Ralph, Susan and some
other people I couldn’t identify were in the room trying to get
tablets of thorazine, which I couldn’t swallow, down my throat.

All I could do was roll around and pronounce a few phonemes, such as
“ah,” “oh,” “duh” and so forth. It wasn’t that I couldn’t think. The
trouble was I couldn’t think any single thing. It seemed as though all
the thoughts which had entered the minds of men and beasts in the last
million years were going through my mind at the same time and with the
same intensity and velocity, resulting in a kind of violent white
hum. I felt a needle in my ass. Ralph had hit me with some thorazine
in a way I couldn’t refuse. “I’m not ready for this,” I found myself
saying, much to my surprise.

“That’s why we gave you a thousand mics,” Ralph said.

A foolish, arrogant and evasive answer. I think they gave me a
thousand mics hoping it would turn me into a cosmic-minder like
themselves. The thorazine, if it had any effect at all, didn’t have
the effect of bringing me down. When I closed my eyes in Dick’s room,
I found myself in Tim’s room when I opened them and vice-versa. I
switched back and forth a half a dozen times before I settled in Tim’s
room, seated in the lotus position, which I almost never adopt unless
extremely stoned, on the bed.

For a while I sat on the bed with no thoughts in my mind, no sense of
personal identity, no feelings about anything one way or another,
while the program for the visitors presumably continued
downstairs. Since my sense of elapsed time was one of the first things
to go, I can’t say if this condition lasted for hours or minutes. The
third floor was deserted.

Then people appeared, clustered around the record player, which was
connected to speakers in the visitors’ rooms. I heard someone say,
“Listen, who does that look like over there?” Someone else said,
“Yeah, you’re right.” Various people, some of whom seemed familiar and
some of whom didn’t, sat down next to the bed and asked me silly
questions. I tried to talk to them but, in most cases, they
disappeared in front of my eyes. I remember grabbing Hollingshead by
the arm and asking him if he was “really” there. He said he was and
then disappeared. At some point in the midst of these absurdities, I
made a decision: I did not want to live without the appearance of
continuity or cause and effect rationality, at least not yet. I lapsed
back into the no-thought world. I would wait it out. Sweat poured from
my forehead, but the rest of my body was dry.

Months later, while loitering around the library of the University of
Miami waiting for a junkie friend of Ed Rosenfeld’s to show up, I
found myself at eye level with a large volume called The Serpent
Power, written by Arthur Avalon, pen name of a high English high
official who had made, in the old and admirable English tradition of
the scholarly amateur, a serious and sympathetic study of Indian
religions in general and yoga in particular. I was astonished and
delighted, when I flipped the book open, to find my two-and-one-half
turns and sweating forehead (“the rain of jewels,” I think it was
called) described as the salient features of the classic
experience. The garish meta-anatomical diagrams of chakras and
ectoplasmic plumbing I had seen at Millbrook and elsewhere bore no
relation to this classic description or to my experience.

The scholar dealing with ancient religious texts can rarely be certain
if he is reading the productions of a fantast, a con man or the
genuine article. By the time these works are lodged in closed stacks
or museums, they are jumbled together in putative value, although the
authors may have contradicted and despised one another while they
lived. The smallest LSD trip is a more reliable source of information
about supernormal consciousness than any book.

When I came out of it and started moving around (drink, cigarette,
bath) I was still stoned in terms of perceptual enhancement but,
compared to what I had just been through, this condition seemed
unexceptional. So all the walls and carpets were rippling and glowing
with arcane life. What else was new? I was glad to be back in the
humdrum everyday world. Ralph stopped me as I was coming out of a
bathroom.

“How are you doing?” he asked. Knowing smile.

“Fine.” I shrugged.

“Listen, we would appreciate it if you would stay away from the
visitors until you’re completely down, OK?”

No problem. The last thing I wanted to do was talk to someone who was
straight. I went to the library and reclined on a couch. Beautiful
room. I contentedly looked around admiring the way the lamplight
gleamed on a gilt binding or contrasted with a soft nest of dusk under
a table. Ernie came in and sat down. He was wearing a Robin Hood
hat.

“How are you doing?”

“Oh, just getting used to it,” I said. “Beautiful in here, isn’t it?”

“Getting used to what?”

“Being God, or whatever you want to call it,” I said.

“Yeah, man!” Ernie seemed delighted with my explanation. “I’m a
magician, you know. A few days ago I decided to try it out, you know?
See if it really worked? So I got this .45 and shot myself right in
the head.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing, man. Absolutely nothing.”

“What about your relatives?” I asked Ernie.

Ernie seemed upset and frightened at the question. With a hurried “I
gotta go, man” he left the room.

Some people insist on testing
out the theory, which Tim and Evans-Wentz preached, that one could do
“anything” if one’s “head was
right.” Later, Tim altered this pitch somewhat to
“you can be anyone, this time around,” and published a
recording on this theme, which has the advantage of being vague and
impossible to corroborate or disprove.

Dick, at the time of this visit, was hobbling around with a cast on
one foot. He had jumped out of a window, intending to flit about like
Mary Poppins, and broken his ankle. Susan Leary’s favorite was to take
off in her Daddy’s car without a registration, license or money.

It’s usually a matter of
taking wild chances with the police as a demonstration of one’s
magical or spiritual “powers.” This delusion seems
to have lost popularity, for which happy development I give some
credit to Tim’s series of carelessness-caused busts and his
subsequent series of imprisonments, all highly
publicized. Kesey’s busts probably helped too. If such notable
super-magicians couldn’t fend off the cops, what hope did junior
magicians have of doing it? I can therefore find it in my heart to
entertain the notion that Tim’s and Kesey’s busts did a
lot of good although saying that they “deserved” them
would be going too far.

In Snazzm terms, I think I went through the same kind of shit for the
same kinds of reasons. For years, I encouraged people to think in
terms of magical powers and supernaturalism, the original Principle 2
and my Senate testimony being the best examples of this shameful
compromise with supernaturalist ideation. It’s easy to say, “Why
not let it go at that? Some Psychedelians will never understand
solipsistic nihilism, so why deny them their comforting
superstitions?”

I no longer worry about it. Those who require comforting superstitions
will keep them, no matter what. My incarceration rate, I’m happy to
say, moderated considerably after I tightened Church
doctrine. McPozzm, I was now a nut case. Wish I had done it
earlier. Oh, well. Live and learn.

I had asked the question which caused Ernie to flee out of genuine
curiosity. Did this troll-like creature have a philosophy or was he
just a mischief maker? If he had a philosophy, what was it? Did he
believe his punctured corpse and grieving, or celebrating, relatives
were to be found in some other dimension, plane, level, bardo, or
“multi-verse”? I wanted to ask him what he thought would have happened
if, instead of shooting himself in private, he had chosen to blow
himself to pieces with dynamite in Yankee Stadium with thousands of
witnesses present.

I wonder, could Ernie’s story have prompted Dick to jump out of the
window? If this were fiction, I would write it that way.

In a dream, phenomenological order can be preserved by forgetting
everything which, if remembered, would make an unpleasant event
necessary, and substituting a history of impressions which do not make
that event necessary, all without disturbing the “laws” of “physical”
causality. It’s typical of such transitions that one knows nothing of
them, but many people can recall certain discontinuities in their
lives, highly improbable escapes from impending disaster, “near death”
experiences, and so on, which may be thought of, Fazzm, as
transitional.

In general, I agree with the classical Greek Skeptics of the West,
from Pyrrho of Elis to Sextus Empiricus (about a 500-year stretch
there, which produced all kinds of terminological oddities, like the
idea of cultivating “apathy” in order to reach a state of “ataraxy”)
and modern Western philosophers of the empiricist congregation, such
as David Hume. The Mysterious East has parallel doctrines, but the
semantic murk is even thicker, as one might expect. Nagarjuna, for
example, denied that he was an “x,” with “x” being the then current
label for philosophers of a certain school in his part of the world,
now routinely translated as “nihilists” in English. Yet Nagarjuna
denied that anything existed. What are we to make of this? In my
opinion, not much. It all depends on what you mean by “nihilist,” just
as it all depends on what you mean by “apathy” and “ataraxy.” All
words are merely marks and sounds, and have no meaning other than the
sensations and images to which they relate.

The antakarana of Samkara, although sometimes a useful term
when talking about the Snazzm organization of intra-psychic events
which appear to be external, is bad Fazzm if a cosmic saksin is
implied, a doctrine which leads to a plurality of “selves” in a
container-contained dualism.

Berkeley’s “Mind of God” solution to the (perceived) epistemological
“problem” is a fallacy because it is an unnecessary multiplication of
entities. There is no problem. Remember Occam’s razor. Cut out the
Middleman. Poof! Gone. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Assume a plurality of selves only in a phenomenological sense,
analogous to ordinary dream content. The yogacara doctrine of
vijnanadvaita and the atamadvaita of Samkara, which
postulates a sort of “absolute” or “cosmic” vijnana series,
should both be rejected. I see no use for this metaphysical junk or
any other kind of space junk or space junkies.

I reject sankya yoga with extreme prejudice, as merely a
dualistic substitute for the original Psychedelian soma practices
which were suppressed by the Brahmanist priests who, unable to control
the stuff and too cowardly to take it, abolished its use by political
means (fire and sword). A thousand curses on the filthy, flea-bitten
bastards.

There is no “subtle body” (linga-sarira). The phenomenological
body is always imaginary. Aloofness from prakrti, kaivalya, or
whatever you want to call it, is impossible since distance and the
space-time continuum itself are prakrti, and there is no
distance between abstracts, at least not where I come from. The monist
Vedanta of Badarayana and his ilk is less objectionable than the
Vedanta of Samkara or Ramanuja, but much ado about nothing in any
case.

All phenomenology is flux (samtana) and an aggregate lacking
self (samghata), as Hume, in effect, says. Instantaneous
“manifestation” of capacity instantaneously “obliterated,” so to
speak. Not only is there no objective “reality” whatever
(sunya-vada), there is no subjective “reality” whatever. The
term “reality” is meaningless. Nabokov, a solipsistic nihilist, was
right. It is the only word in the English language that should be
placed, routinely, between quotation marks (to emphasize its mere
idiomatic utility).

All the effort and the “self-discipline” serve to prevent
Enlightenment, not to “find” it. This can be overcome by taking large
doses of LSD, making the truth irresistible, at least for a few
minutes.

Snazzm, there is no past, present, or future, only the categorization
of images so as to maintain the illusions of seriality and
continuity.

“That time which we improve, or which is improvable,” as Thoreau said,
“is neither past, present nor future.”

Virtually all philosophic difficulties with these concepts may be
solved by recalling that life is (is in the nature of) a dream. If you
have some event in mind which you think might argue against the
solipsist hypothesis, ask yourself if it is possible to dream of this
happening. It always is.

Read the Mulamadhyamakakarika of Nagarjuna, David Hume’s A
Treatise of Human Nature, and Outlines of Pyrrhonism by
Sextus Empiricus. The epigrams of the Zen masters can also
help. Abandon all spatio-temporal “metaphysical” metaphors, including
(it’s all done with mirrors) holography. Use the I Ching.

Testing it out by jumping out of a window or shooting yourself in the
head may lead to your miraculous survival as a basket case or a “human
vegetable.” There’s nothing wrong with suicide, per se, but do not
“test it out.”

I assert the convertibility of phenomenological order, not the
characterlessness of fate.

All reasoning from cause to effect and effect to cause is founded on
“custom and belief,” as Hume put it, on a “harmony” with a “nature”
entirely composed of impressions and ideas which cannot be
demonstrated to refer, accurately or inaccurately, to any objects or
relations in an external world. Hume, unfortunately, chose to call
this a “problem.”

There is no problem here at all for solipsistic nihilists, and this
fact ought to be mentioned by the academicians who make so much of
this supposedly intractable philosophic difficulty when they “do Hume”
in the classroom. It may be a serious psychological problem for them
but if it is, it’s their own fault. If they would only get stoned out
of their gourds and deny the externality of relations for a change,
they would have some “real” problems to deal with, like keeping their
jobs and staying out of jail.

The “principle of association of ideas” which the young Hume excitedly
promised and for mysterious reasons never delivered, is the principle
of solipsistic synchronicity as shown in dreams.

Hume had nothing to say about dreams. I think he saw the connection,
but backed off when he realized how mad such talk would seem to his
learned contemporaries who were, with one or two notable exceptions,
as obtuse about all this as are most of the academic philosophers of
the present day who delude themselves, out of desperation, into
thinking that various specious inKantations “answer” Hume.

Nothing “answers” Hume. Hume’s epistemological conclusions do not
require “answers,” and, as far as I know, aside from declaring that
solipsism is “insane,” nobody who thinks so has ever explained
why they should, or why they are “insane.”

What Hume’s insights require is further development, and I am
satisfied to see my formulations as contributions to this noble
cause.

I renounce any claim to be heard founded on the foolish thesis that
persons who find candles exploding in their vicinity, or who
momentarily disappear from their own or others’ fields of vision, are
necessarily wise or good or even remarkable. The reader who is put off
is a man after my own heart.

Take a thousand micrograms yourself sometime, and then look at the
rising sun.

These strange and impressive experiences have no bearing whatever on
the credibility of philosophic or religious assertions made by those
who have them or witness them. Likewise, there is no more good reason
for modern folks to believe in the philosophic ideas they might get
from impressive beings from outer space than there was good reason for
the Amerindians to believe that the institutionalized insanity brought
to them from across the ocean by Columbus and Cortez was any better
than the institutionalized insanity they had cooked up for
themselves.

Technological advancement is no guarantee of wisdom or virtue, as has
been amply demonstrated by the history of this century.

Nor are the opinions of an Enlightened person on this or that ethical
rule, political party or economic theory necessarily any better than
those of Joe Shmoe from Kokomo. Such things are McPozzm and are
derived from this, that and the other thing. Enlightenment is Snazzm
and concerns the true nature of all things. The Zmms are
incommensurable.

When I went to bed, a big book appeared, suspended in space, about
three feet in front of me.

Fine. A little light reading before falling asleep. The pages turned
automatically when I finished reading the bottom lines. It was a
mixture of Dylan Thomas-style poetry and prose. Unfortunately, I can’t
remember the content any better than I can remember Dylan Thomas’
poetry, but at the time it was all as clear and definite as anything I
might have looked up in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Every letter was illuminated in gold and the pages themselves were sky
blue. A Disney-style production, very common in the second bardo.

When I got tired, I told the book to go away, which it instantly did,
and I went to sleep as quickly and easily as a baby.

If all visionary experience were so obedient, agreeable and modest,
there wouldn’t be any problems with it. It may be that avoiding
threatening and spooky experience is a matter of avoiding fear itself,
which is easier for some people than it is for others.

Folklore has it that dogs attack only if one is afraid of
them. Something similar operates in determining the visionary content
of trips. If one is afraid, the emotion may be expressed in
appropriate archetypal images. When one learns nothing horrific is
involved in death/rebirth experiences (what else is new?) anxiety
decreases, and visionary experience calms down and becomes part of the
background, like vivid wallpaper or a dramatic sunset.

But good “control,” as such, doesn’t impress me as being evidence of
anything except good control. Ramakrishna, far from having good
control, had to have people around to prop him up and point him in the
right direction, as he staggered around making profound statements and
giving the Boy Scout salute. If one concentrates, as Ramakrishna did,
on the most whacked-out aspects of experience, and virtually ignores
everything else, there won’t be much in the way of control. Good old
crazy Ramakrishna, my favorite “avatar.” Since he lived in the
nineteenth century, there are lots of primary-source stories and even
photographs, showing his life in details highly discordant with the
standard myths. His most frequent demand of his disciples was that
they “pass the pipe,” and his diapers were always falling
down.

Perhaps his wisest saying was, “When the choice is between up and
down, go down.” Don’t push it, in other words.

The next day, Ralph asked me if I had “learned anything.” I told him
that all my suspicions had been confirmed. Ralph said nothing, but did
not seem pleased with my reply.

Ernie came over to where I was sitting at the kitchen table and broke
an egg over my head. I backed him into a corner, where he squealed and
giggled and begged for mercy. To hell with it, I decided. Anyone who
would suggest to someone coming down from a big trip that shooting
oneself in the head with a .45 was a harmless diversion was too crazy
to be beaten on by me. Let his peer group do it. I washed the egg out
of my hair and went home.